The complacency and deskilling are a feature, not a bug. The less I have to learn to get from place to place, the more attention I have for other things that can't be automated (yet).
Attributing to a GPS faillure a woman driving 900 miles to croatia when she intended to drive 38 miles within Belgium is naive. Most likely she put the wrong address in, possibly with the help of autocomplete, possibly not. But crazy, drug-addled, and or senile people have been winding up hundreds of miles from where they thought they were for a long time before there were any GPS satellites in orbit. Actual GPS errors in my experience take you to a street behind your inou tended destination, or direct you to streets that are closed. And these errors fall off quickly as the expert system becomes, well, more expert. The GPS navigation app errors tend to be small, bringing you near where you need to go but then requiring some intelligence to realize how to fix the error the system has made. Meanwhile, I drove two hours out of my way on vacation in Florida, an error I could not have possibly made to that extent if I had had the GPS navigation systems I now use all the time.
Automated cars WILL be blamed for all sorts of problems including deaths. The unwashed innumerates will tell detailed stories about how they went wrong and be unmoved by the overall statistics of a system which will cause FEWER deaths per mile driven than do humans. Some of those deaths will occur in ways that after-the-fact innumerates, and other elements of the infotainment industry known as democracy, will tell wonderful anecdotes about them. There may even be congressional hearings and court cases. The idea that a few deaths that MIGHT have been avoided under the old regime is literally a small price to pay for an overall lower death rate will be too complex a concept to get legs in the infotainment industry.
But in the long run, the nerds will win, and economically useful automation will be broadly adopted. We don't know how to grow our own food or build our own houses anymore and we've gotten over that. We'll get over this too and the innumerate infotainment industry known as democracy will move on to its next stupidity.
This isn't a progress vs luddite debate - the fact that the human element of a automation+overseer performs worse than if the human were entirely in charge, is not a general argument against automation (at most, it might be an argument against replacing a human with an automation+overseer model if the gains are expected to be small).
The fact that humans can exercise other skills (pilots apparently do a lot when the autopilot is engaged) does not negate the fact they lose skills when it comes to taking over from the automation.
Consider a mixed system, in which an automated system is paired with a human overseer. The automated system handles most of the routine tasks, while the overseer is tasked with looking out for errors and taking over in extreme or unpredictable circumstances. Examples of this could be autopilots, cruise control, GPS direction finding, high-frequency trading – in fact nearly every automated system has this feature, because they nearly all rely on humans "keeping an eye on things".
But often the human component doesn't perform as well as it should do – doesn't perform as well as it did before part of the system was automated. Cruise control can impair driver performance, leading to more accidents. GPS errors can take people far more off course than following maps did. When the autopilot fails, pilots can crash their planes in rather conventional conditions. Traders don't understand why their algorithms misbehave, or how to stop this.
There seems to be three factors at work here:
So, when the automation fails, the overseer is generally dumped into an emergency situation, whose nature they are going to have to deduce, and, using skills that have atrophied, they are going to have to take on the task of the automated system that has never failed before and that they have never had to truly understand.
And they'll typically get blamed for getting it wrong.
Similarly, if we design AI control mechanisms that rely on the presence of a human in the loop (such as tools AIs, Oracle AIs, and, to a lesser extent, reduced impact AIs), we'll need to take the autopilot problem into account, and design the role of the overseer so as not to deskill them, and not count on them being free of error.